Doubt cast on Pakistan's battle claims

We may have pathological liars for neighbours. Ofcourse such simulation is common in the discourse among states, but when you lend credence to the speculation by others by consistently publishing figures inflated, unverifiable and un-verified allowable for enemy casualties in a bid to shore up your 'aid' in the 'war against terror', and suspiciously low figures for your own troops, then something's gone amiss, and cuzin, huntin' ain't good.

Doubt cast on Pakistan's battle claims
West Point Report; Taliban said to have vacated Waziristan

Peter Goodspeed, The National Post
Published: Wednesday, December 23, 2009

While Pakistan's Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, has claimed a military offensive in South Waziristan is over and successful, a new study published by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., is far less enthusiastic.

It suggests there is little evidence of heavy fighting in the area because "it appears most militants fled in the face of the government advance."

The fact the Pakistan army telegraphed its intention to launch an offensive for almost four months before sending troops into South Waziristan on Oct. 17, allowed the bulk of the Pakistani Taliban to withdraw and disperse to neighbouring tribal areas, the study says.

The Pakistan government claims to have killed 589 Taliban terrorists during the offensive and says 79 of its troops were killed in action, but the study says it is difficult to confirm those claims.

"It was impossible for the media to independently confirm both the military and Taliban claims of casualties due to the lack of access to the conflict zone, disrupted lines of communication and the dislocation of almost all of the civilian population from the area," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, the security analyst who wrote the report.

Spokesmen for the Taliban insist the hardline Islamists executed a "tactical retreat" from their strongholds in South Waziristan. They also claim that while the Pakistan army occupies the major roads in South Waziristan, they remain entrenched in the surrounding forests and mountains.

Still, the report says the Taliban's retreat did not appear to be well organized since they left behind heavy weapons and even cooked food, suggesting they fled in a hurry.

"Lending credence to the TTP's [Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan] claims about a tactical retreat, the government has so far failed to kill or arrest any senior TTP leaders," the study says .

"Even by accepting the military's claims of 589 Taliban fighters killed, it is clear that the majority of fighters -- numbering in the thousands -- were able to escape and will likely continue to pose a threat," Mr. Yusufzai said.

The study suggests Taliban fugitives and as many as 1,500 foreign fighters may have relocated to the Orakzai Agency tribal area to the north. This is where Hakimullah Mehsud used to command a wing of the TTP before he took control of the organization in South Waziristan after the group's founder, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed by a U.S. drone last August.

The Pakistan Taliban have retreated, replicating tactics used by the Afghan Taliban, the study says. Now, they can be expected to employ guerrilla tactics to harass advancing troops and attack remote outposts.

The Taliban have also retaliated by carrying out suicide bombings and other attacks in Pakistan's urban centres.

For its part, Pakistan's military says it is concentrating on clearing militants from captured territory in South Waziristan and hopes to restore public services in the region in time to allow local tribespeople to return to their homes in April.

But Mr. Yusufzai predicts the region could slide into a prolonged insurgency and counter-insurgency.

"The struggle is far from over," Mr. Yusufzai said. "The TTP has proved through its unrelenting campaign of terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities that its capabilities have not been fully degraded.

"Its success in hitting high-security military targets through complex suicide assaults proves that it can continue to launch operations," he said.

the PA is only acting in south waziristan where as north is not touched and north is where most of the alqaeda people are sitting. PA is only doing the minimum to appease the USA, who have linked their aid to the action on the ground.
it is well known from the SU invasion, the fighters retreat when army steps in only to ambush at an opportune time. one never knows when and where and how they strike.
moreover free media is not present to backup the PA's version of the events.
even the 589 members killed may include mostly civilians, a fact which may be hidden.
safe to accept the above report going by the dubious distinction of PA's reluctance, selective action and its plans of using the same groups for a perceived geo strategic game.

WASHINGTON — Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari assured his US supporters that his government was determined to carry on with the fight against Islamic militants until victory is achieved.

"We will not let militants violently impose their political agenda on the people," Zardari wrote in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal.

"Political ownership of the war against terrorism rests with the people of Pakistan for the first time," he continued. "We are in the front trenches of this war while the community of nations stands with us."

Much of the article is dedicated to the memory of Zardari's wife, Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to become prime minister of a Muslim country, who was assassinated on December 27, 2007 after addressing an election rally in Rawalpindi, a garrison city near the capital Islamabad.

Zardari said that Bhutto had died confronting "the forces of tyranny and terrorism, and Pakistan remains committed to the struggle that she led."

He pointed out that the Pakistani army had reclaimed the Swat and Malakand regions from the militants.

"We have taken the fight against militants to other areas, including South Waziristan in our Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and to our major cities, and we will win this war against them," he stressed.

the PA is only acting in south waziristan where as north is not touched and north is where most of the alqaeda people are sitting. PA is only doing the minimum to appease the USA, who have linked their aid to the action on the ground.
it is well known from the SU invasion, the fighters retreat when army steps in only to ambush at an opportune time. one never knows when and where and how they strike.
moreover free media is not present to backup the PA's version of the events.
even the 589 members killed may include mostly civilians, a fact which may be hidden.
safe to accept the above report going by the dubious distinction of PA's reluctance, selective action and its plans of using the same groups for a perceived geo strategic game.

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after billions spent and in aid, and 8 years USA must clearly be seeing this and possibly working on striking at the heart of Taliban country.

What America and the rest of the western world rally needs to understand is that Waziristan is but the face of the monster it's body is spread all over pakistan; by removing the TTP from Waziristan(if true) you manage only to disfigure it's face the rest of the body remains healthy and strong. no fight against the Taliban or Al-Qaeda can be won without tacking their financial and ideological backers in Karachi, Islamabad and Rawalpindi among other places, Similarly the fight cannot be restricted to the TTP alone but must also target it's ideological and spiritual brothers in the JuD and HM among others.

hillary clinton on her last visit to pakistan spoke of a trust deficit which exists between pak and usa.After many long years the americans have learned what india has said for a while now,pakistan plays a double game.

Because pakistan is vital to america on wot, the pakistan army will have lots of new toys for years to come.The only silver lining i see is, the pak ecconomy is fast going down the pan.This means they will have to spend even more of there taxpayers money to keep up with india. The goi should increase the defence budget by at least 25% this year on modernization of the 3 services.

No institution dominates Pakistan like its army. The armed forces account for 20% of Pakistan's national budget, totalling $5bn last year according to official statistics. But the actual figure, already staggering for a country with high levels of illiteracy and malnutrition, is likely to be much higher. The army has been practically unaccountable since the very foundation of the country – last year's figures were the first it has publicly released since 1965.

Those aren't the only imposing figures. It has some 650,000 active soldiers and another half million in reserve, and internal discipline – strict loyalty to the high command among the rank and file – is very high.

Every one of Pakistan's democratically-elected civilian leaders has been forced to abdicate by the army. A general has directly ruled the country for 34 of its 62 years of existence.

With this vice-like grip on power, many are wondering how a rural insurgency armed with basic weapons has managed to overrun so much of the country. The answers have much to do with the Pakistan army itself.

Part of the problem is that the army is equipped for a conventional war against its historical adversary to the east, India, and not the type of insurgency being waged by the Taliban on the frontier to the west. Its operations in the tribal areas have been imprecise, leading to the destruction of many thousands of civilian lives and livelihood. Up to a million are believed to have been displaced by the conflict.

"Collateral damage always strengthens the Taliban, it helps them get more public support," says Abdul Hakim (not his real name), a journalist from Dir, a tribal agency, next to the Swat valley, in which the Taliban are slowly moving.

But there have been only limited, poorly-coordinated attempts to re-engage with communities devastated by armed operations against the Taliban. As a result the Army and government authorities have sheepishly ended up signing peace deals with the Taliban over the past four years. They have all consistently broken down, the Taliban using the lull in hostilities to regroup and rearm.

The most recent peace deal, over the Swat valley, is on the verge of collapse owing to continued Taliban operations in neighbouring areas.

There are lingering doubts about the Army's resolve to combat the Taliban too, as has been suggested when it initially sent up a lightly armed squad of paramilitaries to fight the Taliban in the Buner valley, just below Swat, even though the region is close to the nation's capital.

Another factor is the fact that many of the army's soldiers involved in operations are Pashtun like the Taliban. This has left the high command nervous about tackling the insurgents head-on for fear of causing rifts within the ranks. Although far from a mutiny, many soldiers have refused to fight their fellow tribesman or have surrendered and deserted.

But that has not prevented the army from engaging in operations that have been highly destabilising for tribal Pashtun communities in the affected areas. People fleeing the conflict in Swat and Bajaur, a tribal agency to the west on the border with Afghanistna, told me they felt that the army was, in fact, targeting them and not the Taliban. Some argued this was because the army feared Taliban reprisals. Others insisted they were being targeted because of their support for the Pashtun nationalist Awami National party, which runs the North West Frontier province government.

The truth of rumours such as these, common in Pakistan, are difficult to quantify. But one need not look to rumours to understand why the Pakistan army has failed to defeat the Taliban.

The army has a long history of strategic incompetence stretching back to the very first war the country fought with India in 1948. On that occasion, tribal militants from the regions now in open insurrection against Pakistan flooded into Indian-controlled Kashmir. After numerically overwhelming the Indian soldiers there, they promptly went on a binge of rape and looting while the army looked on.

Again at war with India, in 1965, the better-equipped Pakistan army lost more ground, and tanks, than its adversary. But perhaps the army's darkest moment was the 1971 war that lead to the creation of Bangladesh. That conflict saw Pakistan troops involved in widespread acts of extermination against the indigenous Bengali population of what was, at the time, known as East Pakistan.

The Hamoodur Rahman Commission held in Pakistan following that war found large swathes of the high command to be deeply negligent – the commander of Pakistani forces in East Pakistan, the report revealed, was involved in sexual misconduct even as his troops were killing, and being killed, on the battlefield.

In 1999, an ambitious Pakistani general by the name of Pervez Musharraf devised the tactically brilliant, but strategically near-suicidal, plan to invade Kargil, an Indian mountain post in Kashmir. That gamble nearly led to nuclear war, and almost certainly led to a military coup later that year.

How does one explain these failures? There can be no one explanation. But if there is an overriding message from these debacles, it is that the army is ill-equipped to defend the state because it has captured much of the bedrock of the state to which it is totally unaccountable.

According to Ayesha Siddiqua, in her seminal study, "Military Inc", the army's private business assets are worth around £10bn and it owns a handsome share of the country's business and land. The generals, as a result, appear to be more interested in leveraging control over businesses, properties and politics.

Yet, the army's power is such that although Pakistan's private media have a commendable record of criticising the country's civilian politicians, criticism of the men in uniform is rare – save during periods of crisis under direct military rule, like the dismissal of the chief justice in 2007.

It would be unfair, however, to criticise the army without acknowledging the pivotal role played by its greatest patrons – the United States, and, to a lesser extent, China. Since the 1950s, both countries have lavished military and political support on the Pakistan army.

"Nobody has occupied the White House who is friendlier to Pakistan than me," is what US President Richard Nixon told Pakistan's then military dictator, Yahya Khan, at a 1970 dinner in Washington, on the eve of the murderous war in East Pakistan. More recently, former President George Bush's praise for Pervez Musharraf has become the stuff of folklore.

The army has been rewarded by its foreign patrons despite its incompetence and unaccountability. In the process, civilian political life has been grotesquely stunted, leading the democratic process to be replaced by a crude kleptocracy where non-military leaders represent personal dynasties and not the people.

Is it any wonder, then, that the army struggles to find a concerted strategy for defeating the Taliban?

The army has displaced hundreds of thousands (on top of implanting a hate for the state in them), while continuing to shelter figures like Haqqani, Mullah Omar and Hakeemullah Mehsud. Let's not even get started about what happened to Osama Bin Laden.

Civilian casualties are probably being counted in the tally for terrorist casualties, but in all honesty Pakistan does not look like a country where terrorists are on the run and losing. It is because there is a very real duplicity within the government that people have a hard time believing such high casualty rates for Taliban. I am willing to bet that the ISI and at least half of the upper brass still view the Taliban and their minions in a strategic and positive light. Whether to fill the vacuum in Afghanistan after ISAF leaves or to generate military aid in the current situation, the way I've seen this war progress there is no doubt in my mind that the Pakistani establishment is doing things half hearted, trying to gain out of a terrible situation it created, at the expense of innocents.

Like some of you pointed out, this region can never be stabilized until those who harboured, aided, set up and nourished the Taliban starting in the 80s (who in many cases are still powerful individuals) are punished and imprisoned, or sent for war crime trials abroad. There is a chance they are doing the same this very day.